Google began rolling out Thursday a new search feature that makes finding recipes on the web a little easier.

Dubbed “Recipe View,” the feature lets users filter search results according to ingredients, cook time, calories and more. Users can search, for instance, for recipes containing brussels sprouts, devised by chef Ina Garten, that take less than an hour to make. Pictures, ingredients and one- to five-star user ratings are highlighted in the listed results, helping users quickly discover or bypass recipes.

To use Recipe View, simply select the “Recipes” link on the left-hand panel when searching for a recipe. Google plans to enable the feature to all users in the U.S. and Japan by Thursday evening; it also plans to introduce the feature to additional countries in the future, a Google spokesperson said.

This is great news for me since I love to cook.

Tunisians filled the streets with the help of Twitter. Egypt’s protests were coordinated on Facebook pages like that of Internet activist Wael Ghonim. Libyan dissenters spread the word about their “day of rage” last week the same way. And yet, in these heady days where the entire Middle East seems to be inspired to organize online in revolt against autocracy, it has become fashionable for experts to dismiss the role of social media in 2011′s revolutions.

“People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented,” the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell opined on February 2. A few weeks later, The Financial Times’
Gideon Rachman reminded us that “the French managed to storm the Bastille without the help of Twitter – and the Bolsheviks took the Winter Palace without pausing to post photos of each other on Facebook.”

True enough — and utterly irrelevant. Those uprisings had a strong assist from contemporary technology too. The  Bolshevik revolution would hardly have happened without the telegraphs and trains that spirited Lenin to the Finland station at the right moment. And what would the French revolution have been without the latest high-tech gadget, hot from the workshop of Dr. Joseph Guillotin?

Yes, of course, technology alone doesn’t make revolutions. The will of the people is the most vital ingredient. To ferment revolt, first let their resentment simmer for a few decades. But that doesn’t mean social media cannot provide wavering
revolutionaries with vital aid and comfort. Remember the kids being interviewed in Tahir Square the night Mubarak resigned? What struck me most was what they were doing while waiting for the reporter to finish his introduction: thumbing on their smartphones. Want to hazard a guess at the website they were checking?

Read the full column on CNN.com >>

Is this blog too technical? Would it be helpful to add more basic website development articles?

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